The W-Word

For my first Anti-Room post, I’m going to let loose a small rant that surfaces, on average, every few weeks.

I kind of assume I’m carping to the converted, here, but even if not … well. This is my bonnet, and these are my bees.

Here we go.

Forget the L-word, the F-word, the C-word. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for some people to say the W-word?

You know the one? Five-letter noun, meaning “adult human female”?

Yes, that’s the one: Woman.

I don’t know what it is, but some people just won’t say it.

Recent example: Henry McKean on Newstalk (look, I know), in the run-up to Valentine’s Day (I know, I know!), tells George Hook (I know – Jesus, would you lay off?) what a turn-on it is when a girl irons his shirts. Clearly (I hope to god), this is a tongue-in-cheek, wind-them-up type of remark, but I sweep past the intended fatuous sexism and leap squarely onto my hobby-horse.

(My hobby-milk-white-steed.)

“Henry,” I growl at the radio, “you’re a grown-up. Physiologically, at least. So if you find that you’re turned on by girls you might want to talk to someone about that before it gets out of hand.”

I’ve never felt comfortable with the notion that “girl” is a cool label for an adult. I just can’t separate it from the infantilisation machine that operates in our culture. Youth is superior to age, smooth skin is better than hairy, females are at their most valuable when innocent and unsullied by the vicissitudes of life – all that harmful nonsense.

Anybody is of course free to label hirself “girl” if it floats hir boat, but I won’t. I’ll never be “one of the girls” – and I won’t call another adult “girl” either (I’d have a hard time doing so even if I knew it was hir preference). Phrases like “a girl I work with” make my teeth itch.

That, or I picture Father Ted judging the Lovely Girls contest (they all have lovely bottoms).

I used to grumble about this a lot at choir rehearsal. Our conductor, an adult human female a few years younger than me (and, incidentally, one of the very best conductors I’ve ever worked with), for years had a habit of saying “men” when addressing the tenor and bass sections, and “girls” when addressing altos and sopranos. Men. And girls.

You see the problem.

I don’t know if it’s down to my disgruntled mutterings or just the passage of time, but she doesn’t do it any more.

Now it’s “men” and “ladies”.

Sigh.

It’s a thing, though, isn’t it? I’m sure most of us can remember when we made that transition – you’re out and about, and somebody’s toddler barrels into your legs, or reaches for your exciting scarf tassel. “Mind the lady!” says the child’s adult, and after the initial urge to look around and locate said “lady”, you feel … well, I felt like my mother’s maiden aunts when it first started happening. Your mileage may vary.

For me, “lady” doesn’t jar quite as badly as “girl”, perhaps because it’s merely elitist and inappropriately judgemental, rather than actually squicky. But I’m enraged that these two are so firmly entrenched as the preferred terms – particularly because in choosing which word to use, the speaker is making an (unconscious?) assessment of my age and/or status. I don’t like living in a world where people feel entitled – or, actually, kind of obliged – to do that.

Another radio snippet, from several years ago, has stuck in my mind (not to mention my craw): I don’t know who the presenter or guests were, but they were discussing the very issue of what to call adult human females. Everyone enthusiastically agreed that you can’t say “woman”, because – and this is what stands out in my memory – it sounds like she just crawled up out of a bog or something.

Until then, I’d lived in a bubble where “woman” was the neutral counterpart to “man”. It was dispiriting to realise that this tiny plank of linguistic equality was an illusion.

When I’m speaking to my two young children (who both seem male so far), I consciously try to refer to strangers as “person”, with “man” or “woman” as alternatives if the context calls for them. But I confess I sometimes stumble. I don’t actively want to give offence to individuals (earnest though my wish to dismantle the kyriarchal order may be), and in some cases, it seems easier to mumble “lady” than to make a point.

And so I shunt the problem on to the next generation. But inconsistently, at least. Baby steps.

The problem, of course, is that “female” is a marked category within the kyriarchy. There is no neutral word for “adult human female” because it isn’t a neutral space to inhabit.

Perhaps, in the end, it comes down to personal choice – which of the available words we adult human females feel most comfortable with. Do you choose youth, respect, or the uncharted barbarism of the bog?

Me? I’m thirty-six years old, with two university degrees, two children, a marriage, a mortgage, and a couple of career changes under my belt. I’m entitled to vote and buy alcohol; I have crow’s-feet, varicose veins, and (about bloody time!) one or two grey hairs. In short it’s a long, long time since “girl” was an appropriate descriptor for me. And you can fuck right off with the “lady” thing, too, with its implied judgement of my behaviour and character.

I’m in touch with my boggy roots. Please refer to me as a woman. Thank you.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

38 Responses

The use of these gender terms is culturally determined. Eighty years ago Harold Laski wrote an essay on how to define the term English Gentleman. He claimed that the term as he used it was unique to the British Isles (an argument that seems flawed when you consider gentilhomme). These terms are not always derogatory. For example, ‘You’re a gentleman, sir.’ is a compliment (although it does have a connotation of social class). To be considered a Lady reflects a judgement in your favour.If you are middle aged to be called a girl is complimentary in that to be youthful is favoured in modern society. To object to these terms is delineating in itself and places you socially as much as the opposite. I only once knew a woman who told me that she wished to look old when she grew older. Liar, I thought!

On the lady thing, I have absolutely no problem with being called a lady because I don’t see it as “implied judgement of my behaviour and character”. I see it as as a respectful but very generic term.

I wouldn’t start an email to my Anti-Room gang with “Women,” unless I was being particularly flippant. It smacks a bit of “Howaye!” I do, however, start such emails with “Ladies,” not because I think we should all have tea and scones, but because I want to respectfully address everyone. What’s wrong with being called a lady, anyway? It’s rather nice that someone would imply I was poised and respectable, when I’m so obviously not.

Is it an Irish thing, this ‘girls’? I must confess, I’m guilty of using it in the way you describe. But my American and Canadian aquaintances, I’ve noticed, use ‘women'; and an English friend of mine once gently pointed out to me – when I was ranting about gender inequality in book publishing – that I had used the term ‘girls’, a word which she said would have been completely unacceptable among feminists in the 1970s.

I also just remembered this sentence in an Anne Enright short story (‘Switzerland’):

‘You know what I like about Irish women? he said. I like the way they still call themselves “girls”.’

I think “girls” is used more in Ireland than in England, BUT I think the male equivalent isn’t “men”, but “lads”.

In Ireland, me and my partner (both mid-thirties) will always get, “Are you all right, girls?” from men and women who are a bit older than us in pubs and shops and things. But I’d hear the same people say, “Are you all right there lads?” to men. And Irish men in their fifties will refer to their friends as “lads” the same way that Irish women in their fifties will refer to their friends as “girls”. The latter happens in England but not the former, so it always seems more egalitarian to me in Ireland than in England.

There are definitely uses of “girl” for adult women that bug me, but a lot the time I think it’s more of an equivalent of “guys” or “blokes” than it is of “men”. It annoys me in England that our equivalent of “blokes/guys” is a word for a “young female human” rather than a separate informal word, but the usage of it that way doesn’t bother me too much.

What I do HATE is “female” as a noun. People who say, “a female” or “females” always give me the impression that they can’t say “woman” because it sounds too much like “vagina”.

I’m American, and this is definitely a problem in the US too. It may be the case that more American women will vocally object to it. But I assure you we have plenty of opportunities to do so.

I’ve noticed the media here have a particular difficulty with older teenagers – can’t count the number of times I’ve read in the same article about two 17-year-olds, one a “girl” and the other a “youth”.

Someone else mentioned the refusal to use “Ms” which absolutely infuriates me (and does seem to me to be an Irish thing, or perhaps a British/Irish thing). A friend of mine was recently interviewed by the Daily Mail on a matter to do with her child’s disability. They were confused over whether to refer to her as “Miss” or “Mrs” given that she is married but retains her birth surname. She was told that their house style was to always use one or the other, never “Ms”. She told them she simply doesn’t use either term and wouldn’t choose between them, so they would have to decide for her. (They went with “Mrs” in the end.)

Personally whenever I’m filling out a form that won’t allow me to use “Ms” I just put “Mr”. If they have a problem with that, let them sort it out.

A very interesting post. Once again, The Anti-Room kick-starts the morning brain.
These are some of the things I was taught (about fifty years ago, mostly by example rather than explicitly and mostly, it has to be said, by my mother):
1. Middle- or upper-class females are ladies by right of birth. A lower-class female can earn ladyhood (as a lower-class male can earn the title of ‘gentleman’) through good behaviour.
2. ‘Woman’ is either a neutral description of a lower-class female or a derogatory term. (A lower-class female can be “an awful woman” or “a lovely woman” without ‘woman’ particularly inflecting the description; but when referring to a middle- or upper-class female as “a dreadful woman” the ‘woman’ adds punch to the put-down.)
Things don’t seem to have changed very much. (Except that nowadays some staunch feminists refer to females as ‘girls’. Which is very confusing, god love me.)

I am with you all the way, I prefer ‘woman’ to ‘girl’ and there are class implications of ‘lady’ which I’m distinctly uncomfortable with.

But when I am asking my child not to hurtle into a woman, what comes out of my mouth is “mind that lady, darling” It is ingrained somewhere I find very difficult to override, probably through endless repetitions of my parents to me at the same age. Which at least is incentive to try Really Hard to override, so I’m not just passing the issue down another generation.

Maybe it’s a marker of how young I was when I first encountered feminism, but I’ve always preferred “woman” and during my teenage years I longed for the day when I would have the right to refer to myself as a woman. Not a girl. Not a “young lady”. Certainly not a (blech!) “female”. A woman. I always felt there was something proud, noble, strong about the word.

And so it always pulls me up short when people tiptoe around the word, as if there was something faintly obscene about it.

Despite what some commenters are picking up on, I don’t think the issue is that alternatives to “woman” exist or are used. If I want to call my friends “girls” when I’m arranging a night out, that’s a way of evoking my school years, when we were all girls in truth, and hinting that we’re not going to be doing sober grown-up things. If I want to speak in a formal and old-fashioned manner to a woman of my mother’s or grandmother’s generation, “ladies” trips off the tongue better than “women”. (In a parallel situation, I might say “boys” or “gentlemen”.)

But if people are nervous about saying “woman” or “women” — if they avoid the w-word as much as possible — if they say “men and ladies” or “men and girls” or (shudder) “men and females”, so that it’s obvious that they’re not using equivalent terms for both sexes… something odd is going on.

Oh yes, this, it drives me crazy. I hate it when I’m referred to as a girl. I don’t mind it so much when it’s as an opposite to lads (though apparently in Wexford that was historically a gender neutral tag!) I am an adult female, a woman, with women’s issues. Then again I’m apparently not very “girly”.

Though the way in which women are constantly belittled because of their gender, because of their issues, because of their “otherness” is probably also echoed in this label.

All my cousins live in Wexford and I spent every summer there as a child. I can confirm that lads is indeed gender neutral in those parts and I think I sometimes still use it that way myself as a result.

What about the Cork use of “Boy”? That’s an odd one too and is applied to men isn’t it?

I wouldn’t say that “woman” implies “just crawled out of a bog”, but it does seem to be regarded as unnecessarily blunt when used as a term of address. Usually an indirect one, such as “don’t bother the lady”, where “woman” would feel subtly wrong and you’re left trying to work out what to say. I don’t like “girl” or “lady” either; if I’m addressing a room full of women, I will generally use a term like “everyone”, since after all there’s no reason why I should refer to their gender. I’m trying to think of where I’ve seen “woman” used as a term of address, and it tends to be half-ironic usages such as, “Get a grip, woman!” or “Woman, make my tea!” (Although in the case of my partner, it’s more likely to be the very obviously ironic, “Wench, make my tea!” accompanied by pathetic waving of the tea mug. It’s an in-joke, we probably wouldn’t say it in public.) I’ve also used “good woman!” as a response to someone telling me of something she’s achieved. I don’t *think* I’ve used “Well done, that woman!” “That man” is dialect, I honestly can’t remember where from, but it’s not my native vocabulary (Londoner) and I think I picked it up from Terry Pratchett, where most of the time he’s making a joke by turning it into “well done, that ape/dwarf/whatever”.

I’m 33, for the record, and while I hate being referred to as a “girl” (and by the way, I’ve seen “boy” used in certain contexts to refer to adult men, such as, “He’s such a nice boy,”), this pales compared to my loathing for companies which refuse to use “Ms” and address all women as “Mrs” by default. My sexual orientation and relationship status are none of your business, dearies.

Good post. Part of the problem seems to be the stubborn legacy of women being considered the property of men (“man and wife”, etc.). It’s an idea that held cultural and legal weight for a long time, and still does in many places (and in many minds even in societies that are supposedly more modern).

Several weeks ago I tweeted the following headline I saw in a local newspaper: “Search for missing girl continues”. The woman in question was 33. It’s unimaginable that a 33-year-old man would be described as a “missing boy”. The newspaper editor, incidentally, is a woman.

A line from Jane Mills’s “Womanwords”: “‘Girl’, in some senses, may have lost its earlier negative connotations but it remains impossible to deny the patronising and infantilising attitude behind referring to a woman as a ‘girl’.” This book, incidentally, shows how almost every word that’s used to refer to women takes on common pejorative senses sooner or later.

As Kaite Welsh said in the original discussion, “Why can’t we just be called women?”

One particular bugbear of mine is “guys” used to describe a group – I have even heard it used with an all female-group. Gah, can you imagine calling a mixed group “girls”? (Personally, I use “folk” in those circumstances.)

I think the use of ‘girl’ is quite an Irish thing, elderly women often refer to each other as girl. Being from Waterford and having gone to college in Cork, I’d see ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ just as default terms and not meant to imply anything as far as I can make out. However, I do resent being asked to do something “like a good girl” because that’s just plain patronising.

It is worse in the Irish Language. You are a girl (cailín) until married, and once married you become a woman (bean) so if you never marry—-
(this is done without thinking and may explain the problem we have in English in this country too)

I hate being called a girl, or a young lady.. I’m in my 20s so ideally would prefer to pass for a girl but be recognised as a woman… lady just seems like the speaker is being ironic to me. The worst part of being called a girl, even when quite young, is at work. The men are men, and the women are referred to as “the girls” as if we are a roomful of giggling secretaries from 50 years ago, hanging around the menfolk while they do important things. I’m sure men don’t actually think that when they say it, but it does seem like a bad habit left over from a bygone time.

Very excellent post. One of the reasons I hate being called a girl so much is that in Canada there isn’t really an equivalent to “lads”, so “girl” ends up being used in opposition to “man”, making it seem that much more condescending.

I personally like being called a woman, but I’ll admit that it doesn’t really work as an address to a group – starting an email with “Hey ladies” sounds much more natural than “Hey women”. I generally try to find some way to avoid either, though.

The one situation where I use “lady” with no hesitation is when talking about a stranger in a polite situation, but in part that’s because I also use “gentleman” (“Oh, no, this lady/gentleman was here before me”).

This post and the subsequent comments have really got me thinking. I’m trying to decide exactly how a ‘female adult human’ is referred to in my social circle.

In Italy and other continental languages a female human is called a girl until her early 20s and then is called a woman. Thats it. No debate needed!

I think adolescence has a lot to answer for. It keeps getting extended and there is no term for a female or male adolescent. I think that is where girl/guy comes in.

I refer to male friends/colleagues as guys and female friends/colleagues as girls. I think a lot of it has to do with guessing a person’s age. It is a minefield! That grey area between twenty and…. guess too old and you cause insult. Guess too young and you cause insult. Guess correctly and you cause insult.

The world is obsessed with staying young. Call an older woman a girl and it implies youth. Maybe if society wasn’t so sensitive about age there wouldn’t be an issue. The w-word is so wrapped up in the youth debate that it doesn’t even get a look in.

I agree with you on the youth obsession etc… except in Italy, from my experience, being in my 20s, I am often called woman or girl. With a general leaning towards girl but it’s about 60- 40. The confusion seems to be that in Italian, there is a word of woman which is donna. But that’s not a form of address and it’s rude to refer to someone that way. You’d only use it in abstract, never “look at the woman over there, or I know a woman who runs a shop”. In those case you have to choose between signora (married woman/ lady) or ragazza (girl). It makes English look an awful lot less sexist, I think.

What about the terms “girlfriend” and “boyfriend”?
Also, more often than not, when women are girls, men are lads or guys. – “A girls and a guy”, as opposed to “A girl and a man”, which has plenty of negative connotations.

The thing is, I’m 17 and I honestly don’t know what to refer to myself as!